


nothing gold can stay

by MathildaHilda



Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games), Red Dead Redemption II
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Hosea is a dad, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-17
Updated: 2019-06-17
Packaged: 2020-05-13 14:36:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19253179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MathildaHilda/pseuds/MathildaHilda
Summary: It’s a quiet life at times, but perhaps that is the best kind of life.





	nothing gold can stay

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Nothing Gold Can Stay", by Robert Frost;
> 
> "Nature’s first green is gold,  
> Her hardest hue to hold.  
> Her early leaf’s a flower;  
> But only so an hour.  
> Then leaf subsides to leaf.  
> So Eden sank to grief,  
> So dawn goes down to day.  
> Nothing gold can stay."

You’re an only child, and the only one your mother was to ever have.

You grow up with Aunt Cathy’s son, Little James – named after his father – and he’s close enough to you in age and appearance that the two of you are always mistaken for brothers.

You can count the times you’ve met your father on one hand, and the times Uncle James has been mistaken for your father can barely be counted on two hands and two feet.

You meet your father three times before he dies, old and somewhat alone with everything but the bears in the woods and the drinks in his hands, and you don’t wonder often why you never met him more times.

He’s a bastard through and through, but he is your father. You’ve come to respect fathers, even if they were far from the very best of men (a thought that comes to you later, when you meet two boys with dulled coal for eyes, all on the accounts of who their fathers were).

Momma dies, and so does Aunt Cathy. You almost makes it on the stage, and Little James almost makes through the winter after you leave.

Uncle James barely makes it that far.

 

~

 

You’re young yet, when you meet Dutch over a campfire, reading in the dull light from the fire, casting shadows over the man’s features.

You meet him there, smiles coyly and as sincere as you wants yourself to be, and perhaps your theatrics always have had the better of you, because before you can let your fingers close around the pocket watch, your own pouch rests in the man’s hands.

How he did it, he doesn’t say, because you both have your own ways of doing things.

But all you do is laugh then, when you see the pouch – fabric creased between his fingers since it is nearly empty – and he laughs with you when he sees your own fingers around the clasp for the watch.

It almost feels like you haven’t laughed in a long while, and maybe you haven’t – not sincerely at the very least – and you don’t think it’s ever felt this real in the longest of times.

 

~

 

Arthur – wild, bright and head-far-above-the-clouds Arthur – cuts your satchel from you outside the small saloon that exists close to the water of one of the biggest towns you’ve ever seen, and he almost gets away with it, but you’re fast despite what the kid might’ve thought, and you snatch it back and he earns a throbbing cheek before you can think better of yourself.

He stares at you and almost runs, but Dutch laughs and eyes the kid – barely out of being a boy – with squinting eyes, and the boy seems to be too shell-shocked to even think about running.

He’d cut your satchel with agile fingers, and it was only because of the loss of weight that you even caught that it was gone, and he seems to have done it for quite some time, and gotten caught very few times.

He’s too small for his age it seems, not so much in height as he is in weight, and it doesn’t take too long before Dutch asks the boy if he wants a warm meal in the scorching heat of the midday sun. If it’s out of pity or out of sudden kindness, you never quite learn, but you don’t regret catching Arthur that day.

You never regret it, even if Arthur, and later John, seems to favor Dutch’s teachings over your own.

 

~

 

Bessie stares at you from across the room, her hair framing her face and showing off the deep blue of her eyes, and you can’t help but stare back.

It is impolite to stare; you’d been taught this early by your mother and your aunt – the two older women having lived long into your adult life, in the same home since you were born – but she is quite a sight to behold.

She’s shorter than you by a head, but the hat on her head might add to the height, and it’s not until she takes it off – pulls the pins out of her hair to let them drop to the floor on more than one occasion – and she has to tilt her head back to look at you, even when sitting down, that you find out just _how_ short she is compared to you.

She greets you with a smile, polite and sweet, and you smile in turn, knowing damn well how Dutch and Arthur are having quite the laugh over your stricken appearance.

Never had you seen yourself as a married man, but in the last year you have become a father and a partner some years before that, so the possibilities seems endless.

Seems far more endless, than when you were young and unknowing to what the Hell was the right or wrong road to take.

You leave after a year, and comes back after another, once the cabin has shrunk in size and the world seems to have grown even smaller, and Bessie smiles when you try to explain just why you stole that man’s satchel and another man’s thoroughbred once you’d stolen the papers off of him.

The theft had earned you close to two hundred dollars, but Bessie doesn’t tell you to return it.

She knows who you are, and you almost thinks she might know you better than either Dutch or Arthur or your own mother.

When you think back, you pretty damn sure she knew you better than you even knew yourself.

 

~

 

You find John; a boy of twelve with far worse horrors in his head than yourself had, it seemed like at first, and Dutch shoots the rope before the townsfolk can get the rope any more taut than it already is.

He’s small and wild, a little like Arthur had been, and he spits and curses in what you assume to be Scottish Gaelic or a mix of either and English, and Arthur holds the boy still, and undoes the rope while Dutch does his very best to make the situation preferable for both sides.

You level your gun at the hangman, but you don’t pull the trigger without Dutch’s say-so, and holster it once you pull yourself up on your horse. The hangman glares after you, and the boy spits words in English and Gaelic back at them, and you wonder just who the Hell hangs a kid for petty crimes.

But, turns out, the boy killed a man and stole from almost half the little area of the town you've found yourselves in.

He barely reaches Arthur’s shoulders at twelve, and he’s madder than a hornet’s nest once you reach camp and he’s stopped wheezing through his swollen throat, but even in such a short ride, the boy has wormed his way into your heart.

 

 _(“What’d you do, son?”_ Dutch asks once you've left the angry mob behind, and the boy massages his throat before he responds.

 _“Murt.”_ The boy replies, wheezing the word between rows of yellow teeth and a numb tongue.

 _“Murder? How old are you, anyhow?”_ Arthur asks then, voice finally settled into what he’d sound like for the rest of his life.

 _“Old enough.”_ The boy snaps back.)

 

Arthur drops him in the river in retaliation for an unwanted punch in the gut, and it’s just shallow enough so that the boy doesn’t drown himself.

Arthur almost looks like he’d wished he’d dropped the kid further down, where he himself fell, once when he tried to catch the fish that’d stolen his line.

But, John stays, despite speculations and idle whisperings, even if he does manage to almost drown himself twice.

 

~

 

Bessie dies, and you barely remember the year that follows.

You hold her hand until she stops squeezing yours, and the sound you make once she’s gone is far from human.

John’s gone and hidden himself somewhere – something he always does when things get too hard and too much – and Arthur rests his back against the tree down by the lake with his eyes closed to the world, and Dutch sits just outside the flap of your tent.

There’s a book in his hand, but you don’t think he reads it. He hasn’t flipped page since he took up the position, and you don’t wish to comment on it, even if it is gnawing at the back of your mind.

 

(Grief makes everyone tired, and you desperately wish to sleep for a hundred Goddamn years, long before it’s even over.)

 

Miss Grimshaw and Miss Annabelle sit by the campfire, ears tuned toward your tent without making a sound of their own, the needlework operating in between deft and numb fingers.

Bessie stops breathing, and your heart seems to stop beating.

 

 

You stand up for the funeral, which is held further up the lakeside, and falls down barely a minute after you reach camp again.

You steal Dutch’s finest whiskey, not caring in the slightest about the years you had now spent sober. Bessie had been half of your consciousness, had been the cleverest part of you, and it all seems to have died with her.

Arthur’d carved the cross, allowed you to choose the words, and whispered with John once the kid came back, sometime before you lowered Bessie into the ground. He whispered threats or he whispered his own condolences to the boy who had been there after Bessie and had grown up under her watchful eye.'

They're both grieving; you all are, but neither boy touches a bottle for half a year after Bessie passes.

You know you should say something to your boys.

You don’t, but later, you wish that you had.

 

~

 

It’s always been an uncanny and odd alliance; Dutch van der Linde and Colm O’Driscoll, forged in the year you weren’t with the gang.

Colm rode alone with his own boys, shared information about both bounty hunters and scores that could be evenly split, and it seemed so out of place that you never stop to question it.

It’d always been uncanny. Always been an alliance that balanced on the edge of a knife, sharp and ready to tip over either way.

Colm’s brother, a drunk fool named Jarod, makes a remark one day when he’d taken up the watch between your two camps – patrolling through the woods just like Arthur does once every afternoon – and it's enough for Dutch to shoot the bastard dead.

You're gone before Jarod's colder than the night air, and Colm could threaten worse violence.

He doesn't threaten worse violence.

He performs it, not two weeks later.

You don’t have to ride too close to see just whose head has been placed upon the spike.

 

~

 

You cough the first time when you ride through Minnesota, and it’s inconspicuous enough at first, that no one comments on it.

You’re all coughing on the dry air, and both Dutch and Miss Grimshaw caught a cold in the cold air further up North, so their coughs are to be expected, but yours is deep and almost unsettling the second time.

You cough until you have to catch your breath, and barely gets half a breath in before you cough again.

There’s a doctor in Redwood Falls, the town where you stop to eat and sleep and scout, and the news is far from good.

The doctor gives you years and months, and you pay him for his troubles, leans your head against the wall of the saloon you stop at to drink with Dutch, and it’s almost a relief to have an end in sight.

 _‘Almost’_ , is a strong word. _‘Almost’_ hadn’t saved Bessie, and it wouldn’t save you.

Drinking makes the coughing worse, but you _almost_ welcome the burn of liquor, even if it does have the possibility of shortening your life even more than the damn disease ravaging your lungs.

 

(It takes your lungs before it takes any other part of you.

The bullet takes the rest.)

 

~

 

John complains about the process of building before Arthur can shut him up, and John earns his own income the month you stay in the town by building a farmhouse.

Begrudgingly, of course, but he does it, and then he doesn’t complain as much after that.

You’re not entirely sure whether it was Dutch’s or Arthur’s idea, but you do laugh a little over the prospect of the young, almost arrogant, boy asking for the job of building farmhouses.

Arthur helps build the barn, Dutch asks to build the fence with the farmer’s daughter, and you break the draft horse for the neighboring farm.

It’s different work, but it’s work.

More than once do you hear a yelp from the farmhouse and a barking laughter from the barn, no doubt courtesy of your youngest’s ability to hammer his thumb rather than the nail, and your eldest’s ability to hear everything John has going for himself.

 

~

 

Your family grows every year, shrinks a bit, and then grows again.

Bill pulls a gun on Dutch, and Dutch laughs, and it’s not so much different later when Sean comes along. They’re both drunks and they’re both loud; be it sober or drunk, but that doesn’t make them any less of a member.

Doesn’t make them any less of a Son of Dutch.

Javier comes after Bill and before Sean, and he’s young and quiet until he’s suddenly very loud, and older than his years. You teach him the English he doesn’t know, and he teaches you Spanish in turn, and Dutch teaches Miss Tilly how to read.

 

( _“They’re just some silly stories, Mister Matthews.”_ Miss Gaskill says when you ask her what she writes in that notebook of hers.

It’s trapped under her pen more often than Arthur’s journal is trapped under his own, and it does make one wonder. You’ve asked Arthur plenty of what he writes in all the journals, but all the filled ones are trapped in his chest and most likely never to be read by anyone but Arthur, sometime before he inevitably burns them.

 _“Now, I don’t believe a word of that, Miss Gaskill.”_ She smiles at that, and you do read one of them when she offers, shyly, when most everyone is anywhere but camp.

Miss Karen reads another one, and laughs over the Prince’s inability to process his love for the young woman in the story, but you’ve know the woman long enough to know that she does enjoy it quite a bit.

You were proud even then, but had you known she would publish those silly stories, your pride would’ve known no bounds.)

 

Abigail comes riding in with Uncle one afternoon, brought along out of kindness to her rather than anyone else, in Uncle’s own, slurred words, and she makes herself at home faster than some others had, and Jack – despite John’s protests of the boy inheriting his name – is born in November the same year.

Jack is a quiet one, so unlike what his father must’ve been like as a young child, and only cries when hungry, and when you hold the little boy once - when most everyone is asleep and Abigail has given up the duties of motherhood for just one hour of sleep - you dream a little of what could’ve been.

It’s a quiet life at times, but perhaps that is the best kind of life.

 

~

 

It’s quiet for a year – the year after you take the photograph Pearson keeps on him at all times until his death – and it’s a year filled with little else but a wounded outburst by Arthur one night after John up and left.

Arthur's quiet for the rest of the year, and no one dares to comment on it.

It’s quiet for a year, and then the man stumbles into camp, half-drunk, and tries to worm his way back in like nothing ever happened.

He steals a wagon and earns a good enough price for it, and everyone but Arthur and young Abigail seems to forgive him until years pass, and everything’s a little different.

 

(You’re not there, when Arthur finally forgives his brother fully, but perhaps you saw the beginning of it.

You’re gone before both of your boys, but you do know what forgiveness looks like, and you think you saw the very beginning of it.)

 

~

 

The whole Blackwater mess can easily be summed up with one word; _chaos_.

Micah Bell, newly added and someone you name early on as a wilder man than any other greedy feller you’ve ever met, laughs like a mad man when he pulls open the door to the safe and fills the saddlebags to the brim.

Dutch shoots the woman when the law shoots John, and the bullet would've tripped him into the water; hadn’t it been for Javier’s sharp reflexes that catches John around the waist and pushes him behind the closest building. You shoot another lawman, sprays your suit with saltwater as he drops in, and you heft young Jenny up by the arm and pull her behind the crates closest to the dock.

You both fire, Jenny takes a hit, and you watch half of your family scatter to the other side. Javier pulls on John, who swings his gun around as if his bullets were invincible and never could miss a target, and, in the middle of everything, you see Dutch.

His jaw is locked, and his guns loaded, and he fires round after round at the lawmen, names them cowards and you wonder just what exactly Micah did to worm the disastrous plan of the Blackwater ferry into Dutch’s mind.

You make it out by the skin of your teeth, lose sight of Mac and Sean long before you flee the town, makes it back to camp, and rips the tentpoles from the ground, and pulls the wounded and dying on the hastily loaded wagons.

And then, you run for your lives.

You’ve run before, but never quite like this.

 

 

The snow is deep enough to wedge your wagons four times, and the cold bites every bit of exposed skin it can find.

You bury Jenny up the pass in Ambarino, when the wind howls in the trees and fills your eyes and ears with snow, and you bury Davey not too much later, down by Colter.

John heals enough to ride out with Micah, but only the latter comes back, with a widow in her nightdress holding Dutch’s saddle in a white-knuckled grip and a fire burning in empty eyes.

John healed enough, and then he comes back half-eaten and as close to dying as he ever seems to have come in all the years since the rope snapped above him.

You all healed enough, and then the next few months came about.

Maybe a quiet life with your Bessie would’ve been a far better Hell, than the Hell that came with wanting to live free.

 

~

 

You knew they would one day have to bury you, and perhaps you had entertained the idea that you might have to bury one of them, but never had you ever felt the idea form and take hold until you hold Arthur’s hand all through the night because Colm O’Driscoll was greedy and full of shit.

You’d cried very few times in your life, had always been the one that was steadfast and ready if anyone else fell over the edge and needed some old and learned wisdom and encouragement. You’d cried very few times, and now was not one of them.

 

(More often than not, your grief took the form of anger, and by then, it was far too late for tears.)

 

The tears never fell, even as you had to fight the pull of sleep more than once, but instead they formed into a lump in your throat and stayed there. It got hard to breathe more than once, but it went away every time Arthur took one more, unlabored breath after another.

It stopped completely once his eyes were no longer clouded, and his dreams were quiet save for the usual murmur, but now you were always, long before Arthur’s chest seized up and he coughed into the crook of his elbow – hard enough to spit blood – prepared for the inevitable day where you might have to bury him.

 

(The day never did come in your lifetime, but it came and went every Goddamn time you sat by his lean-to and held his hand through the night.)

 

~

 

You’d been the Doubting Thomas of the gang once Dutch had brought in a taught and young boy, who seemed to know more than he let on.

You didn’t doubt him because of who he was; you simply doubted him because he seemed so young and naïve.

You’d taken in young members before, that wasn’t the problem; you’d just never brought in someone with such an enthusiasm for the horrors of an outlaw life, and who was also taught how to read and write and _still_ deemed the outlaw life as a suitable one.

You doubted him, and then you came to respect him.

He became yet another young son to you, perhaps not taught in your ways of life from an earlier age, but he became who he was meant to become.

He became a friend, and he became a son.

 

(You’d asked one another how you’d want to be buried, and you’d both said that you’d rather be buried next to a friend.

Your only complaint to God once you meet Him, if He were to even exist, would be that young Lenny had had to join you at all.)

 

~

 

Your father told you, once when he was drunk and half-asleep in the chair by the fire the last time you saw him – years before you ever met the eccentric man that came to have such an impact on your life – that when Death comes for you, you were to greet it with a smile and a straight back.

You don’t smile once Death comes for you; once the man who has chased everything good from your life in the past year levels his gun at your back and pulls the trigger once you turn.

Once you turn, and stare the man in the face, stares _Death_ in the face, and regrets very little.

You greet Death with a straight back, and a notion that all those you love will, one day, make it back to what had once been real and true.

 

(They don’t.

Not quite.

But hope has always been the very best of companions.)

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on [Tumblr](http://mathildahilda.tumblr.com) here!


End file.
